Next Generation of Backgammon Games

Doug Orleans of The Gameshelf writes about the Icehouse Game Design Competition and introduces some of the games that participate in the 2008 competition. An interesting fact is that at least 3 of the 8 vying games mentioned by Orleans bear some resemblance to backgammon. Does that mean that the inventors of backgammon forefathers were on to something immortal? 

WreckTangle, for example, is a two-player board game that combines a slight element of chance and a lot of strategy. Played on a chess board, the players' goal is to move and capture the checkers according to the specific game's rules. A WreckTangle game ends when a player has captured three of the opponent's pieces (by creating a rectangle shape using four pyramid pieces) is the winner of the game. 

Like in backgammon, some of the movements taken on the game board are conducted by the roll of the dice. However, the player still remains with variety of possible moves to choose from, and the necessity to take in consideration the opponent's predicted movement. Unlike in backgammon, in WreckTangle, when a player captures the opponent game pieces, the latter cannot re-enter them to the game. 

Other examples of Icehouse games inspired by backgammon include Timelock and Chicken Run. Both of them belong to the family of race games, they involve large amount of strategy and small luck factor expressed by the roll of the dice.